


A Norse Odyssey

by Fire_light



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Timeline, Canon-Typical Violence, Not Canon Compliant, Slow To Update, Universe Alterations, Very Slow to Update
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:47:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22372039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fire_light/pseuds/Fire_light
Relationships: Darcy Lewis & Jane Foster, Jane Foster/Thor
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	A Norse Odyssey

**Things Start With a Bang... ******

********

****

__  
_ _

Darcy sat and scrolled through her phone, looking at the news coverage from the Invasion of New York, and this was nuts. 

Actual aliens from actual outer space.

Again.

Which, honestly was a sentence that Darcy had never thought that she would have to say, but here she was watching, with the rest of the entire world it seemed, while the group of heroes in spandex ™ fought the big uglies from space. It was a couple of hours after what people called the Battle for New York, and all of New York was still reeling. 

Nuts, just nuts. 

The Avengers, as they were now called, had stopped the alien invasion. Now they were working on the cleanup of the rest of the aliens that were still here. Blowing up the alien mothership and shutting down the wormhole...portal...thing...just stopped more aliens from coming through, and so there were still the...ground troops to deal with and prevent them from ransacking and terrorizing people. 

SHIELD was currently working with the Avengers, volunteers, the army, and local law enforcement, so the news was optimistic that things would be back to normal within the week.

Darcy snorted. 

When _she _had learned that there were aliens in outer space, her life had never been the same again, so she doubted that there would be anything normal about regular life anymore.__

Darcy had originally signed up to work with Jane for a science credit she needed, and it had sounded way more interesting than doing a biology credit. Going to New Mexico and then learning wormholes, it was fun. She had just been way out of her league with it, though. Jane had advertised that she just needed a data entry intern with no prior experience necessary, but that had been a flat out lie. Jane had really needed some science task force that actually understood all the math and science that came to Jane as easy as breathing. 

In the first week of her internship, Darcy had gotten a crash course in quantum mechanics and relativity and a refresher on geometry and physics. The second week she had gotten a crash course of the crash courses, and Darcy had to sit down and think if she even wanted to touch another science thing in her life ever again. 

By the fourth week, things had gotten better, Jane and Darcy came to an understanding. Darcy didn’t understand the exact science (she honestly doubted that she ever would; it was freaken’ complicated). Still, she did understand the general idea of things and how to organize things, and if shown, she could enter information to computers from Jane’s many homemade devices and vice versa. 

The new system was working, and Jane and Darcy had been getting along, and it had become more like a fun, super intense science camp for Darcy.

Then Jane had made a breakthrough. She needed more help, so Jane had contacted an old colleague/ mentor and then ran over Thor and started the strangest week of Darcy’s life. They had spent about a week helping the god of thunder learn some humility and possibly some humanity, then had to practically evacuate the whole town, and watch Thor die, then come back alive (Darcy still wasn’t sure how that had all worked out, there is still the possibility that Thor is a zombie now, the jury’s still out on that decision). Then Thor left to deal with his little brother. 

This had all been about 6 months ago, and that had been the last they had seen or heard of Thor, but SHIELD had stuck around and had gotten both Jane and Darcy to work with them. 

More like they got Jane to work with them and then tried to give Darcy the boot because she didn’t have “qualifications” or “was a possible security concern.” They even tried to take away her science credit she was earning as Jane’s intern because of national security or something like that. 

Darcy would have had to do another whole semester because her internship and all records of the online classes she had done had disappeared. 

That had been a bad day. 

She had found all this out by calling her school about possibly extending her internship because Jane had asked if she would stay since SHIELD was now funding Jane’s research, and Jane now needed a proper assistant that understood how Jane ran her lab. 

Darcy then spent the next two hours going in circles with the administration office and counselor office and back again because no one had her on record for the internship, or even, for that matter, had her own record for classes for the semester. She even spent a bizarre couple of minutes talking to the athletics department after an accidental transfer. 

Darcy had finally given up when an administrator had said that it boiled down to the fact that she had taken a semester off on their records and that because there was no official record on the school’s end, there was nothing they could do. She could send in all the teacher notes, assignments, or even a statement from Jane saying she had been the best intern Jane had ever had, which wouldn’t even have been a lie. But that wouldn’t change the fact that she had taken the semester off according to the school’s records. 

Jane had found Darcy about 10 minutes after this revelation, sitting on the lab floor eating ice cream out of the carton and crying. Darcy wasn’t prone to crying; it wasn’t something that she normally did. She felt that she had a bad tendency to argue, be mad, and fight with people if she was upset instead of crying, but this was different. This was school, and she had lost an entire semester's worth of work. 

Darcy knew at that point that it was SHIELD that had done this, and there was probably no way to reverse it. The school had said that they didn’t even show anyone even applied for Jane’s internship, which Darcy had done before the semester even started. All her work had disappeared, and Darcy started contemplating if even finishing school was worth all the hassle and stress that it caused. 

That’s when Jane had come home and made Darcy get up off the floor, stop crying, put the ice cream away, and wash her face. They then went to SHIELD and had been directed to the HR Department, and then Jane had started working on people. Darcy had seen Jane get really excited about her work, but this was something different. 

Watching Jane on the warpath was something that Darcy would never trade for all the credits in the world. Jane stuck up for her, even going as far as to say that she would take her research elsewhere, and then even Agent Coulsen had come to her defense. Darcy never thought that she was even on good terms with the agent since that certain shouting match about a stolen iPod, but he came through. 

So after finding out that someone in the security department had decided that Darcy was too big of a security concern and had done this as a matter of procedure, the issue was corrected, and suddenly her credits were back where they were supposed to be, and now her internship could be extended! 

Now she just worked full time with Jane and did classes online, and Jane had been given an actual lab and more staff to do more research. They were still in New Mexico, and they even got to stay at the old Gas station, but they were able to turn the gas station into a real home since the lab moved out. Jane thought that they would be able to make an Einstein-Rosen bridge within the next two years. Darcy had made a couple of friends on the research staff, and security detail and she and Jane had become more like siblings instead of boss and intern. 

It was nice. Darcy finally felt that things in her life might actually be working out. 

Then things got weird again. She had been up since that morning, and it had been a crazy day. Darcy stopped scrolling through the news feeds and looked out the window. She wasn’t even supposed to be here in Stark Tower; she was supposed to be in New Mexico.

She was currently in the Stark tower, which had stayed pretty much untouched even though it had been the grand entrance for the invasion. Something had blown or torn off the letters S T R and K on the building, so only the A was left, but that was the only major damage to the building on the outside. The rest of the building was left alone and, thankfully, intact. 

Darcy was in one of the labs towards the top of the building; she was still below the A and penthouses but high enough to have a great view of the city. The room they had been given was half an office and half a lab. The lab itself was a long rectangular room, connected to the office through a door; Jane was currently working in the office. She had set Darcy up with a bunch of computers and reading machines to monitor, and then she said something about foreign matter and disappeared into the office about an hour ago.

The room's front half was desks, computers, and cubicles, and the back half was the lab part. There were long tables with all sorts of test tubes, beakers, bunsen burners, and machines. Along the back wall there, it looked like a kitchen. If your kitchen was full of chemicals and other machines. During her exploration, Darcy found a bag of bagels, but she couldn’t find an expiration date, and even though there was no mold, the bagels seemed hard, so she didn’t want to change it. 

Hopefully, once Jane got to see her man and the jet was allowed to fly (there had been an emergency travel ban on to and from New York), she could get some food. Maybe they could even get pizza, and Darcy could feast on breadsticks.

Darcy sighed and tried to rub the tiredness out of her eyes. She wasn’t even supposed to be here. 

She had been woken up in the middle of the night and put on an airplane from New Mexico to Norway for a very special conference with some leading scientists about Jane’s Einstein-Rosen bridge. Except once they got there, they found out pretty quickly that no one there had even heard of Jane, let alone them coming to meet people. 

The research center had been pretty stiff about the whole ordeal; even when they said that they were from SHIELD, Darcy had felt that there was a distinct feeling of dislike that seemed to radiate from everyone there. Jane didn’t notice the cold shoulders, concerned only about the research, and eventually got the scientist to even sit down to conference with her. Darcy joined them warily. Jane had only gotten so far when they had laughed at her for her theories, and that’s when Darcy punched the head scientist in the nose.

Darcy didn’t regret hitting the guy one bit, they were all acting like jerks, and that one had been staring at her in a way that creeped Darcy out. She felt perfectly justified. They had then been promptly dismissed and sent back, but instead of going to New Mexico, they had been redirected to New York.

Darcy yawned.

Between the plane ride from New Mexico, punching out creepy scientist, the plane ride all the way back to New York, learning about the invasion of New York, having Jane go ballistic that there was a stable wormhole over New York while she was over the Pacific ocean instead, arguing with the rude secretary/agent person who said that they couldn’t see Thor because Jane wasn’t on the “list” (Darcy personally thought that was bull. JANE wasn’t on the list? Darcy could believe that she wasn’t on there, she wasn’t locking lips with the god of thunder while he was in New Mexico, Thor had just been friends with her, but Jane?), then listen to Jane complain about that for about 15 minutes while they put together her machines to start gathering data about the wormhole, because “Even though we weren’t there to see it, Darcy, doesn’t mean we can’t still learn from it and it looks like there was some weird radiation coming from here as well!”

So here Darcy sat, scrolling through her phone, watching youtube and news videos, and every once in awhile punching in the information that popped up through the computer, Jane had set up for her. 

“Darcy! Where is Jane?”

Darcy swore and startled so hard that she dropped her phone. Thor had come into the room, and she hadn't even heard him!

“Warn a girl before you scare her to death, big guy!” Darcy said as she leaned down to pick up her phone, checking to make sure the screen was still fine. “She’s in the other room, looking at her toaster reader.”

Thor smiled and nodded and started towards the door to the other room.

“And knock before you get in there, she probably won't hear you, but at least you can say you tried!“

Thor waved his hand in acknowledgment, and Darcy turned to the other person in the room that had come in with Thor. 

The guy was tall, maybe taller than Thor, but most definitely taller than Darcy. She quickly realized that he must be Asgardian. He had the “look” like he knew he was more important than Darcy. He had dark hair, and it looked like it was matted and snarly and his face was all beat up. He was dressed in fancy European medieval armor looking clothing and had a gag covering half his face. He also had shackles on his wrists locking his arms together, and a single gold bracelet just above the cuffs. It seemed out of place with the rest of him looking so beat up and 

“Hi.”

The guy made a scoffing noise, rolled his eyes, and turned away from her, and Darcy felt her face get hot. Getting so quickly rejected for being polite, what a jerk. She probably should not have said just hi to the guy since he couldn’t even respond, and if he was with Thor, he was probably royalty or something. Plus, her mind quickly supplied, the good guys aren’t normally handcuffed, so you should take the hint and leave him alone.

But Darcy had already moved around him to face him again. If he wanted to ignore her and be rude, she was going to be annoying. 

“Sorry, I guess you can’t speak. You look terrible, by the way. What happened?”

This time the man glared at her, but Darcy was smiling sweetly. He turned away again. He had nothing on his legs that prevented him from walking away, so Darcy took that as a good sign that he wasn’t truly annoyed with her. If he were annoyed, he would walk somewhere else and move away. Darcy slid around and faced him again.

“Sorry, I keep asking questions that you can’t answer.” So far, there was no other response; the guy was staring straight ahead. Darcy was a little bit closer to him at this point, and she could now see that there was blood oozing down his neck and reeled back. “Dude,” she said while pointing at his neck, all thoughts of annoying him gone. “That can’t be comfortable or sanitary. Let’s at least get you cleaned up, come here.”

Darcy brushed past the man and walked to the sink that was at the back of the room. She grabbed a paper towel and doused it with water, and then got out a washcloth and soaked that as well. Sitting next to the sink, there was a first aid kit as well, so she picked that up as well, Then Darcy turned back, expecting the man to have followed her, but he was still standing in the same spot. 

“Yo, come here. So that I can help you out.”

But the man just stood there, not moving and seemed not to indicate that he heard Darcy or ever intended to move from that spot. 

Darcy sighed and was beginning to regret her offer of help slightly. She always believed in human decency and felt that if you can help, you should. But also felt that this might be pushing it if the person didn’t want any help. But Darcy knew that she would help him anyway.

She walked back over to the man, set the first aid kit down, and opened it up to look at the contents. 

It was very standard, gauze, tape, tweezers, small scissors, band-aids, antiseptic wipes, an assortment of medicine ranging from asthma relief to stomach relief. Darcy had hoped that since this was a Stark Tower first aid kit that there would be like a mini robot doctor in there to help her out or something, but everything looked normal. 

“Take a seat; I can’t reach your head.”

Darcy placed her hand on his chest and nudged him gently into the chair she had vacated when Thor had arrived. The man stumbled, and Darcy grabbed his arm to help him onto the chair.

“Very graceful.”

The man glared at her, but when Darcy grinned at him, he rolled his eyes and looked away. Darcy brought her hand up to wipe his face, and he flinched back. Darcy immediately brought her hand away and flipped it over to show him the paper towel that she had. 

“Chill dude, I’m just going to stop the bleeding and clean up your head a bit.”

He looked warily at her, and this time Darcy brought her hand up much slower. Since he was now in the chair, she could see the wounds better, and it looked like the blood had been in his hair for a while, and the wound on the back of his head was not the only source. 

As softly as she could, Darcy began to part his hair to try to find all of the cuts. She wrinkled her nose, his hair felt like he hadn’t had a shower in a while, and it was all matted in places due to the blood. He might have to chop some of his hair to get some of this out. Darcy bit her lip; the small cuts on his head started from where his armor ended on his neck to the top of his head. He might have to cut all his hair to have this properly looked at. 

The bleeding seemed to have stopped from these smaller cuts, but there was one large and deep cut on his head's back curve. It looked like that was where most of the bleeding had come from. 

“This one looks bad. Like it might need stitches...I am sooo not qualified for that, but maybe I can find some pain killers for you once we’re done...”

She trailed off; to give him pain killers, he would have to eat them. Darcy couldn’t see a way to take his gag off for that to happen. It seemed like it was literally stuck to his face. There was no discernable catch or latch or lock or anything so that Darcy could take it off. So, taking pain killers was not possible. 

She also doubted that there would be a syringe in the first aid kit somewhere, and even if there was, Darcy definitely didn’t have the skills to give him pain killers that way. 

Darcy took the paper towel and wiped the best she could on the man's neck. She couldn’t reach that well due to his clothes and cape, but while she was struggling with getting as much of the blood as she could, the man bent his neck forward so that she could wipe easier. 

“Thanks.”

After a few wipes, the paper towel was useless, having moped up most of the dripping blood, and only the dried blood remained on his neck, so Darcy switched to the washcloth. She didn’t want to press too hard though, now that the blood was cleaned off, she could see that bruises were darkening on his neck and disappeared further under his clothes. He might even have some neck injury with how dark these were. He probably needs to go to the hospital and check out, assuming that Asgardians' necks are the same as humans. 

“Did someone drop a building on you, or did you just pitch yourself off of one?”

Darcy winced, she had no filter, and if this guy did jump off something, he probably didn’t want to talk about it. But then, she thought she heard the man exhale through his nose in some form of a laugh, but she couldn’t see his face to be sure.

“Sorry, that was kinda rude. I hope you didn’t decide to jump off somewhere though, that would be bad.”

Darcy trailed off again; his neck was relatively clean now, and using the antiseptic wipes on the cuts on his head would probably be a waste since his hair was in the way. She also couldn’t really bandage the cut either, without cutting some hair. It looked like a no-win situation. 

So Darcy brought her other hand up and lightly touched the man’s shoulder to let him know that he didn’t need to lean forward anymore. 

“Whatever had happened, at least you didn’t land on your face,”

Darcy came round to face him again, and the man adjusted his position, and Darcy was able to work on his face.

His face was a mess as well, but not as bad as the back of his head. There was a cut across his nose, one on his forehead that dipped down through his eyebrow and dangerously close to his eye, several cuts along his jaw, and a deep gash across his cheek. When Darcy brought her hand up to use the washcloth, the man didn’t flinch again, but Darcy could see that he had gone very still, his brilliant green eyes locked onto something in the distance over her shoulder. 

“Umm, at least I don’t think that you landed on your face. I can’t really tell, though; maybe you did?”

The man continued to stare into the distance. 

Darcy had finished wiping up most of the blood off with the washcloth and then examined the cuts. The one on his cheek, like the one on the back of his head, was still bleeding, and it also looked like it could use some stitches, or at the very least, it needed to be bandaged. Darcy got out the antiseptic wipes, and when she opened the little packet Darcy saw the man wrinkle his nose, the smell coming off the wipes was powerful, but he was still looking at a spot over her shoulder. 

“This is going to sting a little, but I think these need to be cleaned. I hope that this doesn’t kill you.” 

The man finally snapped to attention and looked at her, eyes narrowing ever so slightly, and Darcy chuckled. 

“I’m kidding; it’s just alcohol or something like that, so you should be fine. I’m sure you’ve got that stuff where you’re from. Thor was very familiar with beer, so it probably won’t be a problem. I don’t really drink, but I know that wine ‘n stuff has been used in medicine for ages, so I’m sure that medicine can’t be all that different from where you’re from.” Darcy paused and survived his face. “I’m going to start with your eyebrow, so umm…”

He did not react other than to close his eyes and tilt his head back. Darcy took this as permission to start. She gingerly put her hand on his forehead to steady him and started. He was shockingly still, so either the wipe wasn’t stinging him, or he was really good at hiding pain. Darcy guessed it was probably the first one. The Asgardian probably didn’t even feel the sting from the Antiseptic wipes. He most likely had super strength or something like Thor did.

“Or maybe your medicine is super-advanced on Asgard. But it might not be. Thor was super old fashioned when he first showed up, so who knows, I have no idea, although that would be cool to see what’s different and what’s the same. Asgard must be so cool. Thor said a bunch of things, and it sounds super cool.”

Once she was finished with his eyebrow, the man opened his eyes again and looked at her, raising that same eyebrow. Darcy knew that she was babbling, but it was rather awkward to sit there and clean his face up. At least when she was doing his neck, she wasn’t looking directly at him. 

She turned away and dropped the wipe into the trash can under her desk. She then got a second one for good measure, wiped the cut on his nose, and then the cut on his cheek. This was still actively bleeding, which was probably a good thing since she couldn’t really flush out the cut properly. So, Darcy just carefully wiped around and then wiped over the whole thing, trying not to agitate it more. 

It took one more wipe to clean up the cut fully, and then Darcy cut a length of gauze, folded it in half and then half again, and pressed it against the cut on his cheek. She then secured it with tape at the top and bottom and then stuck a long tape down the middle for good measure. She then got out a band-aid and pressed it to the cut on the bridge of his nose, smoothing down the sides carefully. She absent-mindedly pushed his hair out of his face, and took a step back and survived her handiwork.

His face and neck weren’t perfect; he’d probably need to take a shower to scrub the blood out of his hair and get some real medical attention for his wounds. But Darcy hadn’t done too bad. 

“Is there anywhere else that I, uh, well…”

Looking at the rest of him, Darcy felt a twinge in her stomach; she guessed that there was a deep cut on his arm because there was also a rather large bloodstain there. It was wet, so it too was probably still bleeding, but she couldn’t get to that one. It didn’t look like she could take his jacket...coat...cape...thingy off when he still had the cuffs on. 

“You’re not going to win a beauty pageant, but at least you’re cleaner.” Darcy looked at her hands and saw that she was now the one covered in bloodstains and looked into the first aid kit to see if there was another wipe that she could use to clean herself up with, but they were gone. “We should see if you can get a shower to clean off or som-”

Then the windows exploded.


End file.
